Stephen M Pickles wrote:
In the strawman, we would be allowed to construct a document containing a compound usage record which itself contains a sequence of compound usage records, each of which comprises two atomic usage records, containing e.g. (1) some usage information about a compute job, and (2) usage information about an associated network reservation. As I understand it, Matt's question pertained not to the identity of the agent producing the record, nor to the identity of the ultimate end-user, but rather to how to identify the intermediate compound record as being about compute+network usage.
OK. I think I understand. That's something that the CompoundUR does not try to tackle at all. The CUR definition makes no assertions at all about the meaning of the compound; they're together because someone or something thinks they should be together. However, I believe it would be possible (maybe after a bit more schema hacking) to further subclass the CUR to get a kind of compound UR that defines what the compound means, which is not a problem at all from my perspective, or failing that, the extra meaning could be attached to the CUR through its extensibility support. I'm not stating which is preferred, and I can see reasons for doing things both ways. (Subclassing allows for better enforcement of any extra rules, extending is easier to make interoperable, even if not in a necessarily useful way.)
I think what this comes down to is that the atomic usage records might need to be more strongly typed.
More types of UsageRecord (e.g., SRMUsageRecord, NetworkLinkUR)? That's fine with me, except for the actual matter of really writing them. At that point, my laziness takes over. :-) Donal.